Many organizations and businesses provide service to their customers via a contact center. In the contact center, agents equipped with a computer that is linked to the organization's internal and external network handle a large volume of inbound and outbound interactions with customers. The agents may work locally in the contact center or remotely via connection to the contact center systems. Some contact centers are operating as an in-house department and some contact centers are hired by the organizations and being operated by a third-party agency for different reasons such as lowering organizations expenses on customer service.
Nowadays, with the available variety of communication channels, many contact centers foster these varied types of communication channels to provide service to customers such as telephone calls, faxes, emails, chat, social media, co-browsing, SMS (text) messages and MMS messages. The services may be provided via inbound interactions or outbound interactions.
Outbound interactions are commonly initiated by the organization for billing, collections, reservations management, pre-admission and the like. In some industries such as the healthcare industry or the hospitality industry, the customer is being contacted before arriving at the premises. For example, in the healthcare industry, a patient may be reached out by an agent in the contact center in a process of pre-admission to a medical procedure. In another example, in the hospitality industry, a guest may be reached out by an agent in the contact center before arriving to a reserved vacation at the hotel or resort. Yet, in other industries, interactions are performed proactively for customers retention purposes.
To indicate to the agent in the contact center that a customer should be approached, the agent is presented with a digital preview of the contact which includes all the necessary details regarding the required outreach and pre-determined pending media desired for the interaction. For example, a customer may be 30 days late in making payment to the organization and may be identified by the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system as needing to be contacted in order to bring the account current. An agent in the contact center may be presented with a digital preview of the contact and the required payment along with a preferred media which the agent should use to contact the customer.
Currently systems tie the digital preview of the contact directly to the pre-determined pending media that is desired for the interaction with the customer. Thus, agents are refrained from providing service to other customers while they review the information related to the potential contact. For example, in case the pre-determined pending media desired for the interaction is a voice call, the agent is reserved for the pending voice call while the preview is taking place, which is preventing the agent from being available for other interactions via other communication channels. However, in most cases, many of these preview interactions end with the agent determining that the interaction should be handled later and not immediately.
With many contact centers engaging in multiple session handling, i.e. Omni Session Handling (OSH), this dedicated experience of the agent to the digital preview interaction, may prevent higher priority work from being routed to the agent while the agent is previewing a possible interaction and also may withhold maximizing agent's capacity and may interfere with established service-level agreement (SLA) goals. Therefore, the review period of the interaction should not be treated the same as a live interaction with the customer and the agent should be available for other interactions during the digital preview.
Currently, there is no technical solution which allows an agent to preview contacts and groom the agent's personal preview contacts queue while working on other active interactions calls (i.e. inbound or outbound) or any other active interactions via other communication channels.
With increasing regulation related to customer service, more companies are relying on digital preview to deliver a more targeted calling effort. Therefore, there is a need for a technological solution that will allow a digital preview of a contact to be delivered concurrently with other active interactions such that the agent will be available for handling higher priority voice calls or other interactions.
Furthermore, there is a need for a technological solution that will not restrict the agent to the preview contact until the agent has chosen to interact with the preview contact or even until the contact responds, thus having the contact center efficiently utilizing the agent's capacity.